From Fierce­Biotech IT [editors@fiercebiotechit.com]

“Tech glit­terati strut DNA online

By George Miller

Com­ment | Forward

Ten DNA-sequenced vol­un­teers are post­ing this most pri­vate infor­ma­tion online, unpro­tected. You’ll rec­og­nize some of them by rep­u­ta­tion, if not their DNA: pio­neer­ing tech­nol­o­gist Esther Dyson, and high-ranking indi­vid­u­als from the tech/biotech indus­tries and academia.

They are bar­ing all, so to speak, mainly to see what hap­pens. George Church, a geneti­cist at Har­vard Med­ical School, is behind the expo­sure. He, Dyson and eight oth­ers will post not just their DNA, but also med­ical records and descrip­tions of their phys­i­cal traits, says Forbes.

It’s an effort called the Per­sonal Genome Project, in which the vol­un­teers will relate the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing such per­sonal infor­ma­tion pub­licly avail­able. Researchers want to deter­mine the risks of DNA expo­sure, and learn how to develop soft­ware capa­ble of man­ag­ing human-scale DNA data volumes.

The ten vol­un­teers are just the begin­ning. Researchers are in the process of recruit­ing the first 10,000 vol­un­teers, on their way to 100,000 from the gen­eral public.

- read the Forbes arti­cle
- check out the project Inter­net site
- here are one volunteer’s anno­ta­tion results
- see the intro video ”